Friday, September 15, 2006

There have been a lot of ripples caused by our ever impending move. At least one was to our benefit.

Back in February when we were planning for the Sun building, when it was thought that everybody would be sitting in a 7x9 office, accommodating people and their belongings was a concern. (It is again, now that we are all going into 6x8 half height cubes, but that is another story.) We gave serious thought on how to cut down on wasted space.

One thing that came up was monitors. All of us in engineering had 20-21" CRT monitors sitting on our desks. Some people had two or three. They take up a large amount of real estate on your desk, and nobody's desk was going to get any bigger. There was also some concern about the amount of heat generated by a big CRT in a 7x9 office.

As part of the plan to get us into smaller work areas, we asked for an LCD monitor for everybody in engineering. As it turns out, at HQ, a new standard LCD monitor had just been designated, the Dell 2001FP, a 20" 1600x1200 native resolution monitor.

A pallet of these monitors arrived in late February. All of engineering got one. There are still empty 2001FP boxes sitting around like it was Christmas last week.

These are nice monitors. They are nicer still if you have a video card that supports DV-I output. The company was not going to pay for that, but a couple of people, including myself, had spare video cards at home with the necessary output.

So for the last seven months or so we have benefited from the move in at least one way. Well, most of us have. One engineer said that 1600x1200 isn't enough resolution and he stuck with his 21" CRT running at a very tight resolution indeed. He wears glasses and sits very close to his monitor and I do not wonder why.